[damien] and the blighting of bp part 3

How Blogpower comes into all this

The first few months

In the early days of Blogpower, we were accepting anyone and so we had the good and the not so good pouring in. Somewhere along the line, about half the members took exception to the BNP being in there and threatened to leave.

This is still highly controversial both at BP and outside in the sphere. Half the members said “free speech” and the other half said “the BNP is anathema”. From my point of view, as an admin, if the BNP wasn’t using BP for political purposes, then there was not really a case to answer.

Many British members [remember that BP is international in scope] did not see it that way and mass resignations began. It was in this quandary that a windfall came in the form of documented evidence that Wayne, the BP member, had been taking the p—s after all, I published that and then a vote was taken to eliminate him for two months, with the right to reapply after that time.

A number of things came out of both that episode and the other one involving an acronymed blog I can’t now remember. I was seen by half the membership as having done the right thing but the libertarian half saw me as a modern day Joe McCarthy and were far less inclined to accept any moves on my part to “call out” people who were taking the p–s.

Ubermouth

Into this, with unfortunate timing, came a request for help from Ubermouth, in which she showed evidence that Damien had been using his blog to recruit girls for his movement. Ubermouth will confirm that I thought this far-fetched at first and I didn’t do anything to help.

The idea that Damien was doing anything like this, when he was just an all round good guy to everyone, seemed stupid. Still, I thought, better to check out his blog and when I did, immediately the apolcalyptic nature of it, the fixation with disparaging his Catholicism and the sexual overtones made me stop and think again.

The quadruple strike against Ubermouth was that:

1. She was presenting something so outrageous, to the extent that no one could believe what I now know to have been the truth;

2. She had been so integrally involved with him that it seemed like a lover scorned scenario, an angle he was keen to exploit;

3. She was so emotional in her manner and yet so unflinching in her attacks that it got people’s backs up;

4. He was able to spread what he knew full well about her mental state at that time, [a state that he had reduced her to over a period of time], to other key BP members, e.g. the admins and also to BH admins later.

She had no chance this way. I plead guilty for my reaction at the time too and I think BP did not treat her well – she was too hot to handle and no one really knew how to act.

It was only as her story unfolded in dribs and drabs, in long emails and then silences, that it really did seem to have something to it. I knew nothing at the time of how her former friend had been turned against her over Damien, about all the attacks on her and her attacks back [the lady can give as good as she gets] and the whole sordid affair.

Essentially, she was a woman alone at that point [excluding one family member].

Evidence trickles in

This was the point where the first corroborating evidence came my way and that was when I went public at the BP forum. Welshcakes immediately sprang to Damien’s defence against what I’d written [without checking with me what I had] and many others were in shock at the attack “out of the blue”.

As further material came to hand, once people knew what I was doing, none of it was on the record and Damien, fair enough, swung round and demanded to know who it was who was shopping him.

In those messages I was stating the substance of what I had but without the names, even as I’m doing now. As I refused to name the [now] three women, he turned to BP and said that his case rested. Clearly I couldn’t expect him to be excluded with that state of affairs and so it died away for a while.

Behind the scenes, a lot of email correspondence was going on about me, to the point where eventually Tom Paine wrote to me and virtually said I’d gone off my brain. This was the general opinion in sections of BP. Interesting that Tom Paine did not see fit, as a high-powered lawyer, to check the evidence I had, before sending that email.

Reasons for not naming the women

The real reason I was refusing to post the women’s emails or name them can be seen in an incident in November 2008 when I finally did post an excerpt and within twenty minutes, Damien sent the first of thirteen emails in one day, naming the girl to me and saying that he’d never said those things.

His rapid response to my post would have done the SAS proud.

There was another reason I wouldn’t publish the women’s comments at the time. A number of those women knew of a young homosexual man who had allegedly thrown himself in front of a train after Damien had supposedly called him a faggot and told him to kill himself. The evidence for this was what he supposedly told one of the women himself one evening. Whether or not this was true that he had done this, a number of women clearly saw it as true.

I was not in a position to publish that, as I didn’t have final evidence at the time and accusing someone of causing another’s death is a far cry from what had been said up to that point.

It was an impasse and unless something new came up, this matter was not going anywhere.

Moving along

We entered a phase now where he started demanding apology and exoneration but as he was as guilty as hell on the evidence I’d seen, that was hardly going to happen. As often occurs in these situations, a certain sympathy set in for Damien and as I’d been instrumental in Wayne departing and the acronymed blogger refused by the members, they now saw this as another one of those.

More than this, JMB and others were now writing about the matter as a feud between two bloggers, with Damien chiming in with the word “Vendetta”. No one sat back and thought that the welfare of BP might have been my primary concern, closely followed by the defence of the sphere as a whole. No one sat back and thought that I was acting as an admin demanding the expulsion of someone who had grossly breached the BP ethic.

This remains to this day a sticking point.

Damien, feeling safer now, started putting it about that I was off my head and under the control of a maniac – Ubermouth. More risible in terms of any available evidence at the time was that we were “cyber lovers”. I wrote back that I quite liked the idea, actually.